35 Quotes by Graham Nelson

If you're setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign.

I don't really believe in 'directions' in art; the rope twists as you follow it, that's all.

Players very widely disagree with me about what's hard and what's easy. and in a way, 'I won, but it was a fight' is the best compliment a game can receive.

At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.

A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game.

The most frequent complaint is that it's hard. True. it's a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I'll tell them.

The time has mainly gone on getting Inform into a decent shape for public use. I suppose the plot of 'Curses' makes a sequel conceivable when compared with, say, the plot of 'Hamlet' but none is planned.

This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell.

Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.